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This article builds upon work which aims to 'de-exceptionalise' displacement [Cabot and Ramsey, 2021. Deexceptionalizing Displacement: An Introduction. Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 12(3):286–299] by describing two hitherto unresearched examples of 'unexceptional' displacement. Both involve abandonment and going missing, and both throw light on the ways in which gender, space and emplacement work together to produce particular vulnerabilities via what I have called 'spatial precarity'. In the first, lost or abandoned girls are held in a government-run Safe House on the outskirts of the city. In the second, women are displaced from their marriages when their husbands go missing. The context is a rapidly changing urban environment in which the rapacious development of property and infrastructure has led to a cityscape that is never stable. This environment, and the socio-political relations that are constitutive of it, have helped to create the conditions in which certain people get lost and others go missing, leading to highly gendered forms of displacement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on qualitative research on marital problems in Dhaka, this article uses the term 'intimate extractions' as a lens to explain the relationship between escalating levels of demand dowry and neoliberal development in Bangladesh. Evidence from across Bangladesh shows that demands for cash made by husbands, accompanied by threats of violence or divorce, are on the rise. Building on gendered theories of contemporary capitalist development and feminist analysis of microcredit, the article argues that demand dowry should be understood within the current context of rapid economic development in Bangladesh. High levels of precarity, lack of state welfare and the need for cash for businesses, labour migration, education and healthcare mean that people from all social classes are in perpetual need of money. Marriage problems and the practice of demand dowry present opportunities for husbands to extract money from wives and their families. Embedded in the intimate relationship of marriage, demand dowry can therefore be understood as a 'conversion', a process in which intimate relationships are converted into projects of capital accumulation, thus becoming an 'intimate extraction'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on Andrea Pia's notion of the ethical fix, this article shows how emotional fixes are used to bring emotions into balance at a feminist nongovernmental organization (NGO) in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Promoting a noninterventionist stance in which its advisers do not directly tell their clients what to do, the NGO provides legal advice and counseling to women facing problems in their marriages. Emotional fixes include building clients' inner strength, cooling emotions, and shaming abusive husbands. These fixes enable the advisers to reconcile what appears from the outside to be contradictory positions: feminism, on the one hand, and adherence to hierarchical kinship norms, on the other. This means that more intractable issues are avoided and the potentially contradictory ethical stances of the advisers are obscured. Client emotions are malleable and fluid, and injunctions by advisers for clients to cultivate particular states, such as 'coolness' can work in a range of ways. While the antipolitics of the emotional fix can cut both ways—concealing both emancipatory and conservative politics ‐ like Pia's ethical fixthe emotional fix itself remains piecemeal and fragile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Overseas migration in Biswanath, Bangladesh has led to an economic boom in the area, whereby people from poorer communities are provided employment. But the extent to which the poor are helped and provided social protection depends on whether they come from nearby places and whether they have established social relations with the rich patrons.

This article discusses the circumstances surrounding death and bereavement amongst Bengali families in East London. Based on fieldwork amongst Bengali elders in the Spitalfields area the article suggests that death and some of the rituals surrounding it are rapidly moving from the private to the public domain within Britain. Whilst `traditionally' in Sylhet most deaths involve the mobilisation of locally based social networks for support and ritual, material and social factors mean that in London death often takes place within hospitals and hospices rather than homes. Combined with this, rituals of bereavement are often carried out in Bangladesh, where bodies are returned for burial. This can mean that some members of the family, especially widows who do not usually accompany their husbands' bodies to Sylhet, are excluded from important processes of ritual grieving. Many widows are also far more socially isolated in Britain than stereotypic images of Bengali extended families might suggest. The situation is not, however, static. Within the context of rapid social and cultural change and the `Islamisation' of some parts of London's East End, Muslim cemetaries are becoming established, and the ritual centre increasingly moving from Bangladesh to Britain., Death in the Bangladeshi community is becoming increasingly Anglicized and traditional rituals changed or omitted due to social circumstances. Widows said that their husbands often died in hospital without prayers or their family beside them. Nor could the widows comply with the necessary seclusion period. Often men were buried in the UK rather than being flown to Bangladesh. Compromises have to be made but as Britain becomes more Islamised, Muslims will find it easier to perform their religious and cultural rituals., As the most profound of all rites of passage, death is not solely a matter of individual experience and emotion but is also inherently social. As Bloch and Parry comment: [...]

The economic effects of migration has a serious impact on the home region of migrants, according to a study of migrant and non-migrant families in Talukpur, a village in Sylhet, Bangladesh. In the village, 29 of the 70 households had family members in the UK, seven households had moved to the UK, and 26 were not involved at all in migration. There is 'migration mania' in Talukpur at present, with everyone believing economic success lies abroad. Families who had relatives in the UK were sent money and bought land from their neighbours, which led to a land-owning prevalence linked to migration by 1987. This led to higher prices. Since the early-1970s, however, migration has been cut back, and original Bangladeshi migrants have settled in the UK, and gifts of money are petering out, therefore accepting the standard of living in Bangladesh.

WILCE, JAMES M. Eloquence in trouble: the poetics and politics of complaint in rural Bangladesh (Oxf. Stud. anthrop. Ling. 21). xx, 300 pp., illus., tables, bibliogr. New York, Oxford: Oxford [...]

Belonging to others is an analysis of how womanhood is culturally constructed over time amongst Muslim Bengalis. This is an original and insightful contribution to the anthropology of South Asian [...]

Until recently, the anthropological analysis of development has remained relatively marginal to academic anthropology, where it has tended to be labelled 'applied' and assumed to be of limited theoretical interest. [...]

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Based on ethnographic material gathered from villages surrounding the Bibiyana gas field operated by Chevron in north east Bangladesh, this paper explores the apparent paradox between the corporation's programmes of development and the response of residents who insist that the company ‘should do more’. The paper draws upon theories of the development gift which focus upon the ethics and moralities of corporate giving and the ways in which development gifts extend capitalist power, re-embed morality in the market and bind recipients into hierarchical positions of unequal exchange. In contrast, we know significantly less about the moralities and motivations of the populations to whom the gifts are offered. Aiming to fill the lacunae, the paper shows how at Bibiyana the ‘community engagement’ programmes take place in a specific moral terrain which pre-dates the arrival of Chevron and has profoundly affected how their development goods are perceived, utilized and contested. Whilst Chevron's ‘community engagement’ programme is underlain by ethics of detachment and aims to create disconnection via discourses of empowerment and sustainability, this is at odds with the local moral economy of connection, which is underlain by the ethics of Islamic charity and patronage, and in which hierarchical differences are explicit. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this book Arturo Escobar reformulates the 'development as neo-colonialism' stance in terms of discourse theory. This, he argues: 'gives us the possibility of singling out 'development' as an encompassing [...]

This paper focuses on the ways in which children negotiate complex transnational identities and roles. Based on research amongst Bangladeshi children living in East London in families who maintain transnational linkages with Bangladesh, the paper draws attention to the ways in which British-born Bangladeshi children are mobile not only across places but also across time. The paper also draws upon Katz' notion of ‘emplacement’, with its focus on political and economic processes, and indicates the significance of children's mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This introductory article sets out the main challenges that the study of children poses for the understanding of transnational migration. Children are not simply a neglected empirical group, whose perspectives are rarely considered; children can also provide researchers with important insights concerning the nature of transnationalism if the phenomenon is considered through their eyes. Research on transnational children brings to the fore issues concerning familial practices and discourses, the importance of the life-course and of generation, and the role of feelings in creating and changing transnational relationships and imaginaries. Focusing on children and children's places raises important questions concerning the relationship between the life-course and the global political economy. Finally, researching with children raises particular methodological challenges and approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paperarticle, based on ongoing research carried out in Bangladesh since the mid-1980s and field-work in London in the late 1990s, I take a historical approach to the analysis of transnational Sylheti marriages. By showing how the form of these marriages has changed since the mid-twentieth century, I argue that transnational migration is itself highly fluid. The role of wives in maintaining transnational links is central to the account. I focus in particular on the wives of “first-generation” migrant men who came to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and whose families were generally reunited in Britain by the 1980s. By describing the household and caring work of these wives both in Sylhet and London, I demonstrate that rather than being “dependants” of their migrant husbands, women have been central to the success of migrant households. The rewards of transnational connectedness have, however, come at a cost – long-term separation from loved ones. Isolation and loneliness have been hallmarks of the experiences of these earlier generations of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on international migration in South Asia, with a growing emphasis upon how places and people in are interconnected. Whilst recognising historical continuities, it is worth noting that the contexts of migration from and within South Asia in the last 100 years are specific to the range of historical as well as cultural and economic conditions. While economic conditions might shape or constrain migration, decisions to migrate are embedded in wider notions of progress and mobility, exceeding simple economic motivations. It may be useful at this point to disentangle modernisation as a descriptive term referring to actual processes, from modernity as a number of socially located discourses which try to apprehend and direct such processes. The dependence of modernising agriculture in West Bengal upon seasonal labourers from neighbouring states is as great as that of cities such as Bhilai or Calcutta, or the Gulf states, upon industrial workers. Migration may be part of a strategy to avoid not only the state, but also other relationships. This may be the result of changed, living or working conditions in the places which people migrate to. When women move independently of their families to take up salaried employment, the effects are equally complex.

Using the Department for International Development's recent White Paper on Development as a case study, this article critically reassesses Escobar's notion of development discourse. Rather than being monolithic and static, as Escobar and others have implied, the writers argue that changes can and do take place within development organizations. Not only does the White Paper clearly signal a new direction in policy; it also results both from changes within DFID - in personnel and in the balance of power between interest groups - and between DFID and civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author tries to examine facts and motivations behind the spiritual travel and transformation in Sylhet, Bangladesh, considering the case of the shrine, Abdul Hossain. Hence the central theme of this article can be said to be two: first, the spiritual transformations and miracles of pirs; and second, the economic opportunities, and subsequent economic transformations, of migration. Abdul Hossain's case is, however, distinctly contemporary. Unlike most pirs, he had no followers during his lifetime, and claims that he is a pir have only been made some years after his death. His cult is also exclusively confined to members of his immediate patrilineage. The legitimacy of a "pir" is supposed as a social construct. But of particular interest in the construction of Abdul Hossain's pir-hood is its relationship to change in his family's economic status, and their subsequent attempts to transform their own religious status. Like many other local shrines, the mazaar of Abdul Hossain is partly a result of overseas migration. More than the donations of devoted disciples, it was funded by remittances sent by family members in Britain. The author suggests that migrants were part of the culture of miracles. The economic transformations resulting from migration have however led to a gradual rejection of charismatic pirs. But rather than moving away from their cults to complete monotheism, change has come internally; the cults have themselves been transformed.

A letter to the editor is presented about the three important issues involved in testing Vitamin D.

• This community-based early diagnosis programme is reaching a deprived population. • The programme detected lung cancers at an early stage, 76% at stage I or II. • The earlier detection implied a projected 22% decrease in risk of death from lung cancer. This Liverpool Healthy Lung Programme is a response to high rates of lung cancer and respiratory diseases locally and aims to diagnose lung cancer at an earlier stage by proactive approach to those at high risk of lung cancer. The objective of this study is to evaluate the programme in terms of its likely effect on mortality from lung cancer and its delivery to deprived populations. Persons aged 58–75 years, with a history of smoking or a diagnosis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) 2 2 COPD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. according to general practice records were invited for lung health check in a community health hub setting. A detailed risk assessment and spirometry were performed in eligible patients. Those with a 5% or greater five-year risk of lung cancer were referred for a low dose CT 3 3 CT, computed tomography. scan. A total of 4 566 subjects attended the appointment for risk assessment and 3 591 (79%) consented to data sharing. More than 80% of the patients were in the most deprived quintile of the index of multiple deprivation. Of those attending, 63% underwent spirometry and 43% were recommended for a CT scan. A total of 25 cancers were diagnosed, of which 16 (64%) were stage I. Comparison with the national stage distribution implied that the programme was reducing lung cancer mortality by 22%. Community based proactive approaches to early diagnosis of lung cancer in health deprived regions are likely to be effective in early detection of lung cancer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dealing with excess death in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the question of a 'good or bad death' into sharp relief as countries across the globe have grappled with multiple peaks of cases and mortality; and communities mourn those lost. In the UK, these challenges have included the fact that mortality has adversely affected minority communities. Corpse disposal and social distancing guidelines do not allow a process of mourning in which families and communities can be involved in the dying process. This study aimed to examine the main concerns of faith and non-faith communities across the UK in relation to death in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The research team used rapid ethnographic methods to examine the adaptations to the dying process prior to hospital admission, during admission, during the disposal and release of the body, during funerals and mourning. The study revealed that communities were experiencing collective loss, were making necessary adaptations to rituals that surrounded death, dying and mourning and would benefit from clear and compassionate communication and consultation with authorities., Competing Interests: Competing interests: LB is a member of SAGE SPI-B committee, Ethnicity Subgroup and Independent SAGE., (© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2021. Re-use permitted under CC BY. Published by BMJ.)

Background: Over recent years there has been increased interest in the disease burden associated with vitamin D deficiency. This, combined with recognition that the prevalence of vitamin D deficiency is high in the UK, has led to increased requests for vitamin D assessment from primary care clinicians., Setting: A primary care cohort in Liverpool., Question: How has the usefulness of vitamin D testing changed over time in identifying deficiency?, Methods: Vitamin D results from primary care practices in Liverpool were collected between 2007 and 2012, inclusive. Results were allocated to six cohorts based on year of request and each was grouped into three categories (adequate, insufficient and deficient)., Results: Vitamin D results of 9460 (74%) first tests and 3263 (26%) retests were analysed. Total number of requests increased 11-fold, from 503 in 2007 to 5552 in 2012. Overall 42% of first-test results were deficient (< 30 nmol). With each incremental year, more cases of vitamin D deficiency were detected - but the odds of detecting vitamin D deficiency decreased., Conclusions: An exponential increase in the number of vitamin D requests was observed over this six-year period. Although more patients with vitamin deficiency were identified, the increased number of tests represents a significant cost to health services. Moreover, the practice of retesting too soon after treatment can be inappropriate. There is a need to develop clear guidance for assessing vitamin D status in primary care.